Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Meaningless world

The world I perceive has no meaning except what I ascribe to it. It looks like things are good or bad, but this is really just me judging the world according to my prior conditioning and experiences.

I went to the club last night for an NYE party. I've been trying to train myself to enjoy the club scene because I've never felt like I fit in and it still bugs me that I feel like a wannabe after all these years. Instead of letting loose and enjoying the party, I anxiously scoured the dance floor for people who would play a role for me in my story of being cool.

It was humbling (or humiliating) to so helplessly revert to such childish social comparisons. These judgments come from an insecure past that I keep alive because I'm convinced of their truth. Ultimately, though, how absolute can one ego's perspective be? This form I take, this life with its history and learnings, is just one out of many in a long line of attempts to survive on this planet, and even survival is an arbitrary perspective that the ever-changing universe seems indifferent toward.

Meaning is not out there. I write upon the world what I think it means and then lament that the meaning is so full of meanness. I describe the world as uncaring and competitive when it is in fact meaningless. Letting go of my meanings scares me because I believe I would become nothing without them; I would have nothing to live for. I'd rather have a cruel world than nothing at all. Sensing the meaninglessness of the world, I then seal myself in opposition to it by calling meaninglessness itself uncaring and a cruel joke.

But obviously, the world is still here regardless of whether I give it any meaning. It would make sense that I drop the need to attribute to it any good or ill because even calling something good means bad must also exist, albeit elsewhere, and that will just upset me. Maybe when I erase my graffiti on the world, its challenging complexity will dissolve into a simple "this is".

As I look at the dance floor and the social arena, I see classes of people keeping people in and out of their cliques. I see competition for status at the expense of others' feelings. Actually, I'm just upset that I see a meaningless world, and these perceptions are just masking my upset and the scary meaninglessness. I am becoming aware that the world is beyond my complete understanding, and that's okay.